


Pyrrha

by rosekay



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:04:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosekay/pseuds/rosekay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phoinix visits a changed Alexander in exile.  A missing scene from Fire from Heaven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyrrha

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



> Did my best to follow Renault's half-Latinized spellings - hope the story does her justice.

At Cheironea, the winds were high enough to sting his eyes, miles of golden plain turned up in dust that that floated with smearing fingers over flashes of armor so that the sense of depth was lost, the Athenian phalanxes seeming, for moments, to stride along the dreary mountain ridges that loomed behind them.  But the sun made everything clear in his head, liquid gold to stripe his veins, dry his anxious palms that ran slick over sword leather as the waiting made the horses anxious.  He still remembers with breathless clarity the break in the Athenian line, the shrill, harshly syncopated drive to battle in his head like something drenched and divine.  Moments before, he had spared a brief wish for wine, but that vanished like a dream, for there was Hephaistion, steady eyes cut close against the teasing wind, one long-fingered hand drifting absently over the grooves of his sword belt.

When Phoinix, pale and unlikely in the raw, Epirote ranges, Phoinix whose tired skin painted Alexander’s hands, asks him if he’s seen battle in the west, Alexander thinks of Cheironea, not the pleasant heat beneath his arms in battle, not the barreled bunching of Oxhead’s muscles between his thighs, but the long walk afterwards in the cool air.  His father always left him hot, more so than the weight of a sarissa or clear lines of strategy.  Philip is a mountain, swarthy and meaningful where his wife and sun turn their heads toward the fluted light.  As a boy, Alexander knew with barely callused fingers the broad, uneven geography of his face, the places where wine swelled the fibers of his muscle, where pride lay curled like a serpent in winter, glutted and masked still before a discontent spring.

He disdains his wife’s Molossian airs, the odd little terrors of a land full of sheep stink and undeniable antiquity.  Philip can have his favorites among the guards, can breathe hot for the Attalid girl and her wheat gold hair, but he cannot turn Dodona away, cannot avoid the old shadow of the Nekromanteion that seeps warmth from the whole land, the heart-drop of the Acheron and Aoos cold in everyone’s veins, though they are less imposing in person, only water crushing wrinkled rock.  They have the presence of something that whispered against land-walking gods, and Alexander can imagine these rivers rising up to match the rage of Thetis’ son.

The southern cities and even Macedon seem distant and unreal here when light and breathless wind make his sense of minutiae waver, as if the stretched sigh of the dialect – _Apeiros_, his kinsman say proudly – has done some irreparable damage to whatever holds them all in place.  Olympias once told him in one of her rages against his father that there were generations in the trees.  As a child, he had thought of dryads’ limbs reaching peach-soft and bloody from the harsh branches.  Alexander is not the callow boy that Philip shamed before his table, high voice still trapped in his throat, clear skin built to hold blood like weakened marble, every flash of whim and fear for the world to see.  He has walked among the dead as he has walked among the olive groves, turned flesh and stripped armor with Hephaistion’s elegant hands, poured full of calm admiration and the sly strains of regret that might have wound around them at Mieza, still laid out content in the red sun.  The letters seemed fearful and spiky beneath their eyes even then, calls to battle, the round, soft-written certainties that began litanies of death, cut quickly with a slash as if to gesture at mercy.

Illyria made him weary, Epiros restless.  The tribesman with their faces marked, the brave ones gleaming with torque at their necks, the smell of men.  Alexander imagines he can feel Homer in Epiros, more than just hurtling hexameters pressed into his palms and the sibilant whisper of rawer dialect.  He feels it when he soothes the road aches away from Phoinix , when he lays a finger along the crook at the base of Hephaistion’s spine to give himself a measure of calm.  There is something alive here that he cannot fathom in Athens, or even Aigai with its lurid portraits, all the heroes of antiquity stretched and made larger than pigment and tile should accommodate, so Philip can say his visitors left with their eyes still held up.  Alexander, looking out at where Neoptolemos had come on the slick of Priam’s blood, cannot think of anything more crude. 

Epiros is dangerous because it loosens something inside of him.  He would like to think it’s his mother’s god, signs rising up to imprint on his flesh, but it sits lower and more strangely than that.  Epiros makes Alexander dangerous in the fashion that he feared, in some small way, that he would be here alone and bitter in the wake of his father’s whim.  Watch for the Oracle, his mother said during the first hard journey, watch for yourself.  Alexander watches Hephaistion, tall and well-formed beneath the ancient trees, as comfortable with a sica gripped strong with long fingers as a blade made in Aigai.  At Cheironea, Hephaistion was Alexander, the shadow to make him strong, the columns of Pella, dearer because he felt like just another strand of Alexander’s own sinew, reliable, unremarkable even when they tangled.

Hephaistion in Epiros is clean-smelling and dark-haired so the Molossians watch him half-warily.  Alexander thinks that even Achilles must have felt this uncertainty after the heart-tripping burst of an aristeia, after all the godly rage had sapped his veins of fleetness and unnatural strength.  Did he long for camp, some small rest, some small comfort?  Or further, because Epiros drives his mind back instead of hurtling it forward into other memories of other plains, other gorges, full of dead men and strong sinew waiting for another chance.  Achilles loving Peleus, but always a danger.  Zeus has made you a threat to him, his mother says, voice coiled in her throat, Zeus has made you whole and strong.  When Alexander has to crane his neck to look down, when he feels his fingers tremble, he thinks to Achilles before the shield, before Homer’s chiasmus ringed him into a neater destiny, to leave little scraps of him in the eyes and mouths of others centuries later.

Had he a young face, eyes too wide apart?  Something in the mouth maybe, Alexander likes to think so when Hephaistion touches his mouth with a quiet smirk, able and sure of himself.  Odysseus must have thought his mouth a girlish one, even if only for a moment.  Here, he is ready to stretch his skin, to pretend anything that drifts in, to hold Hephaistion’s creased brow of concern to a smooth afterthought, lie back and think about brown hands and stately fingers snaking up his thighs in the Epirote grass.  Hephaistion’s mouth has always been clever, shaping swift iambics and looping, soft-hearted elegiacs into where Alexander’s skin is soft and easily pleased.

In Epiros, they have outgrown nothing, but Achilles must have felt the weight of a hard soul surrounded by women’s silks, women’s bangles caging young, scarred wrists.  Alexander wonders if Odysseus had dug them into his skin, made a mark, when he grasped the blood-hungry hand, if Achilles had let him.

The steam has ruffled his hair, the towel limp as a dead snake in his hands.  Alexander corrals his mind, thinks of Illyria, of Cheironea again.  The old man is waiting for a fuller answer, a sharper one.  He’s speaking, pulling back into the edges of himself in the heat of the room, once again Phoinix's pupil as he breathes in Phoinix's mortality, but his tongue drags a little numb, mind in the hills.  Hephaistion is waiting.

"We won," he obliges.


End file.
